Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian writer and photographer, and the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal and The Crocodiles. We met Youssef last autumn in Cairo, and we are proud to publish Arab Porn on 60pages.

The Triumph of Arab Porn

Masturbation is as central to the Arab Spring as it is to Arab Porn, states Youssef Rakha, inventive, intriguing novelist from Cairo, in his essay “Arab Porn”. He wrote the text for 60pages after a workshop in Cairo in the fall of 2015 – the implications of what he has to say about the nature of political protests, their narcissistic way of turning a common cause into a vanity project, the irresponsibility of a lot of the people involved, but mainly the understanding that this is what politics should look like, a mass of people on the street or on Tahrir Square, presumably with very little plan of what to do with the notion of power: This all has a strange resonance today, after the failure of a liberal approach to politics which led to a US president Trump. You can learn from the future of democracy by studying the authoritarian past, sadly. Listen to what Youssef has to say.